Buying mailing lists and sales leads
- tips and traps

Chasing leads can be very time consuming - that's where buying leads can seem very attractive, but probably one of the biggest minefields in marketing is where and how to
purchase email lists.

Buying a list of leads is something you need to consider very carefully as the wrong purchase can not only be a waste of money, but land you in very hot water.

List rental vs. list buying

There's an important distinction to be made between buying a list and renting one - and it will impact on price. When you rent a list, you never get to see the email addresses - the list owner mails out on your behalf and you'll be charged each time you do so. When you purchase a list, you receive all the details.

Buy lists and sales leads!

Since 1972, InfoUSA has been providing the
most comprehensive list data in the industry, and
is the only company to own a proprietary database of 210
million U.S. consumers and 14 million U.S. businesses
Get your sales leads from InfoUSA

Pssst. wanna buy a cheap list?

Just about every day I get unsolicited emails offering email lists of all types and demographics, sometimes millions of addresses - and as cheap as chips. If you get unsolicited offers and the company or individual offering them doesn't have a demonstrated history of list brokering, don't waste your money; because many of the email addresses will not be in the demographics claimed, many will be dead addresses and there's likely to be quite a few spam trap addresses among them.

What's a spam trap?

Unscrupulous parties touting themselves as being "list brokers" usually use automated means to collect email addresses. Either they
purchase them from spammers or they use harvesting programs to scan sites for email addresses then dump them in a database.

Some companies bury email addresses in the source code of their pages which aren't visible to humans viewing the page, but are picked up by harvesters. That way, a company knows any email coming into that address is spam; and they then take further action. This further action may included contacting your web host with a spam complaint, which can endanger your account. In more extreme cases, the company may also take further legal action.

Reputable list brokers

While there's many good list *rental* services around, companies that will sell you details are very few and far between.

For B2B (business to business) leads, the only company I've come across with reasonable rates is InfoUSA. Founded in 1972, InfoUSA has over 14 million USA and Canadian businesses in their database that are 100% phone verified and updated monthly. However, they don't provide email addresses - but there is a way around it.

InfoUSA has some excellent features for narrowing down your targets, therefore reducing costs. Using their wizard, you can zero in on specific categories, company sizes, no. of staff .. and the important one - site URL. With that information, you can visit a site, further gauge its suitability for your campaign and grab the email address. It certainly beats trawling through search engines and directories for results and will save you a ton of time; plus turn up a stack more leads.

If that still seems to time consuming, InfoUSA
does offer a list rental service whereby they will send mailouts on your behalf.

For B2C email lists (business to consumer), there are a few respected companies around, including InfoUSA who have over 200 million records, but the records again won't have email addresses - just postal details and phone numbers for mail and phone canvassing.

Special care and expectations

Because you'll be approaching people and businesses that may have never heard from you before, give careful thought to your campaign as you may only get one shot. It's a lot more challenging to sell to someone who doesn't know your company and products and they are far more likely to opt out of any communication you send.

Don't expect the same sort of positive response from a bought list as you do your in house lists. Also, no matter how good a list is, there will always be some dead records as businesses change contact details (or wind up operations) quite often - expect the dead record rate to be up to 10%.

In the interests of transparency and disclosure, please
note that the owner of Taming the Beast.net often receives goods and services
mentioned in reviews for free, or may receive payments or affiliate commissions for
advertising or referring others to merchants of products and services
reviewed.

Copyright information.... This article is free for reproduction but must be
reproduced in its entirety, including live links & this copyright statement must be included.
Visit http://www.tamingthebeast.net
for free Internet marketing and web development articles, tutorials and
tools! Subscribe to our popular ecommerce/web design ezine!

Online
meeting & webinar software reviewPowerful, easy to use collaboration tools that can help improve your marketing
sales and training efforts. Learn more about these services in this review
& try a free
trial!

Credit
card transaction fraud screening! Effective fraud screening is an
essential part of running an online businesses. Fraud transactions cost you
money and can threaten your merchant account. Pick up a stack of transaction
screening tips in this free guide!

Guest posts & spider
junk food
If you receive unsolicited offers of guest posts for your site or blog, be a little wary of them.
::
Crowdturfing
Becoming Rampant
Crowdturfing is a threat to any SEO practitioner or site owner that tries to play by the rules
in regard to ranking well in search engines.
::Page speed optimization
Optimizing page load times can help with your rankings and sales - pick up some site speed optimization tips.
::Proofreading tips
A few handy tips on how to proofread your own articles when time is limited
::The traffic value of a
no.1 search rank
How much traffic will a no.1 search engine ranking give you compared to other top ten ranks? Find out in this article
::
Looking for more internet marketing or ecommerce web site development
guides?Articles Archives:
one - two - three